Tag: boat museum

Eyemouth museum boat and historic maritime items collection goes under the hammer

Auctioneer Sweeney Kincaid is selling the contents of the large Eyemouth World of Boats collection held at locations at Eyemouth, Cardiff and Lowestoft.  Be quick, for it closes 12 Noon on Wednesday 26th July.

The item are being sold under the instructions of the liquidators of Eyemouth International Sailing Craft Association Limited (Eisca), a Scottish registered charity.

It is a genuinely big sale, with some 270 boats from around the world including working boats from the UK and round the world (fancy buying a junk, sampan, a pearling dhow or an Azorean whaleboat?) classic racing dinghies, a currach, and a gorgeous North American Whitehall skiff. There really is some very interesting stuff here…

There’s also a photo archive, books and maritime ephemera. To get a sense of it and find items you might be interested in, see the online listing.

The collection started life at the Exeter Maritime Museum (ISCA) in 1968 and was added to during the time it was in the hands of Eisca.

Frankly, it’s a stunning collection – and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since Turk’s sold its collection of boats used for film and television work some years ago. Both sales underline the fragility of collections held in the private and voluntary domains – if things don’t go well, at any moment collections and material can be lost, including both the artefacts and the information about them.

The entire contents of Eisca locations throughout the UK will be auctioned individually, here online, closing online on Wednesday 26th July at 12 noon.

Watchet Boat Museum acquires ropery equipment

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Watchet Boat Museum acquires a ropery

Watchet Boat Museum acquires a ropery

Watchet Boat Museum acquires a ropery

Watchet Boat Museum acquires a ropery

The ropery equipment at its old home at Edenfield.
Click on the photos to see larger images

Watchet Boat Museum has acquired some interesting old rope-making equipment and plans to use it to show the process to the public.

The museum at Watchet in Somerset has acquired the equipment from the former Britannia Rope & Twine Ltd factory in Edenfield in Lancashire, which closed its doors in 2001.

The old factory used to be one of the area’s biggest employers, manufacturing products ranging from skipping ropes to ropes for boxing rings; it even made hangman’s nooses and the rope-pulls for toilets used in Butlin’s Holiday Camps.

Honorary curator John Nash told me that when he first saw rope-making equipment being shown by rope and knot expert Des Pawson, he felt strongly that the Boat Museum would benefit from having some similar equipment, not least because he noticed that demonstrations of the the machinery in use were very popular with the public.

‘We had a machine made at great expense and that worked well,’ he told me, ‘but now we have the real thing, and it’s even better.’

Thanks for the information John!

To visit the museum’s website to learn about the Somerset flatner boats and to buy plans, follow this link: Watchet Boat Museum.

And click here for more intheboatshed.net posts on the on Watchet museum.

Des Pawson’s is available at Amazon.co.uk Des Pawson’s Knot Craft and at Amazon.com Des Pawson’s Knot Craft .